The Fallacious Nature of Conventional Wisdom on National Security

When Charlie Black gave his interview to Fortune in which he implied another terrorist attack on US soil would be beneficial to the McCain campaign, the backlash centered on the idea that he was in fact hoping for such an occurrence. While even I am not cynical enough to believe he could wish for such a thing, the underlying point he was trying to make still instills deep frustrations.

That idea--that Republicans are inherently more capable in the area of national security--is one that has been thoroughly debunked by all available evidence of the past 7-plus years, yet it lingers. Despite demonstrable proof that the world is less stable than when George Bush took office, the existence of an al Qaeda stronghold in the mountains of Pakistan, the creation of a new haven for unrest in Iraq, an emboldened North Korea, and a strategic windfall for Iran, conventional wisdom still holds that should terrorism return to American shores, the public would want a Republican in charge.

Apart from what should be obvious--that conventional wisdom is almost invariably wrong--there is ample proof that it is especially so in this particular case. In examining the reasons for this persistence, there seems a dearth of legitimate ones. The most glaring supposition is that the public, or the media personalities who pretend to speak for them, juxtapose positive results with strong posturing.

At nearly every turn, Bush has taken a strong rhetorical stand against terrorism, but all attempts to follow through on his threats has met with disaster and failure. After promising to "smoke 'em out of their holes," he has allowed, via a deviation of resources, al Qaeda to grow even stronger on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and concurrently the Taliban to begin to reassert itself in Kandahar and elsewhere.

Iraq is perhaps the most prescient example of valuing bluster over substance, as Bush employed bullying tactics with both Saddam Hussein, Congress, and the American public before proving his argument to be entirely devoid of veracity. Nonetheless, conventional wisdom holds. What matters is not that the US created a new terrorism nexus or handed Iran the greatest strategic windfall it could have dreamed of, but that Bush talked tough. By appearing strong in the face of a challenge, the utter failure of the follow-through is granted. Only under these circumstances could the President and his surrogates now undertake preparations for an attack of Iran under nearly identical conditions as the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. The narrative is a carbon copy, yet the failure of the previous foray does not factor into the analysis.

Why this is so is not so easy to ascertain. Liberals think it's a sign of a conservative press, but I'm more apt to think of the media as lazy, inept, and overly deferential to power. Journalists are a mouthpiece for the administration, due mainly to the lack of motivation for actual investigation, but I don't believe this will change should a Democrat take office. The press will still write articles made up entirely of quotes from public officials, and the conservatives will have even more reason to cry about a liberal press.

The second factor is that the press is afraid, journalistic integrity be damned, to be labeled un-American. Facts no longer matter. What matters is that the government is supported in its endeavors, regardless of how inept or counter-productive they are. The majority of the public has neither the time nor the initiative to follow through on the end game of the policies, so they are beholden to the superficial coverage of the American media, which eats at the trough of trivialities and conventional wisdom fallacies.

Why, then, are we to presume that McCain would be better in office than Obama? If the implication is that McCain will be an extension of Bush's stance on terror, then shouldn't the opposite conclusion be reached? How does an examination of the results of the past 7 years not lead to seeking a different angle? The policies are clearly failing, as any objective analysis would illustrate. al Qaeda is stronger. The Taliban is back. Iran is stronger. Iraq is now an unstable terrorism boon. Success cannot be found anywhere, yet still we are supposed to buy into the Bush-McCain policies.

There is only one explanation for such a position: Facts no longer matter. Results are immaterial to the argument. Words matter. He who talks the toughest wins, and if the country ends up less safe, so be it. Conventional wisdom is nearly impossible to slay. Credibility's a different animal.

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Changing the Rules of the Game, April 1

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Phil Gramm and Undercutting the War on Terror

Given the predictable nature of American politics and its false sense of ideological diversity, it is guaranteed that a central theme of the coming general election will be that Barack Obama, and by extension all Democrats, are soft on national security and that only John McCain is capable of protecting the country. While a tired theme, consistently dispelled by all available evidence, it still has legs as conventional wisdom.

While any assessment of the last 8 eight years of the 'strong' foreign policy will see the strengthening of al Qaeda (in the FATA), Hamas (in Gaza), Hezbollah (in Lebanon), and Iran (by its proxies and in Iraq), the media narrative remains intact. In addition, the last 8 years have seen Iran continue its nuclear ambitions unabated--despite the furrowed brows and promises not to converse--and North Korea on the verge of achieving a working weapons program with nary a notice by the Bush administration.

In light of the obvious failure of the policy by any available criteria, John McCain will run on much the same platform. He often holds up his disagreement over the Iraq war as a significant divergence, but McCain's only complaint was that the US didn't send enough troops. Never did he question the wisdom of ignoring al Qaeda in favor of deposing an impotent white whale. Following that path to the nomination is fraught with potholes for McCain, however, as his team of lobbyists has a long history of shilling for brutal dictatorships--Myanmar, Zambia, Qaddafi to name but a few.

While those relationships may be in extremely bad taste, McCain's relationship with former Senator Phil Gramm illustrates a much more nefarious portent for US security and the War on Terror.

Gramm, as campaign co-chair, is "a valued voice on economic policy," according to McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker. Gramm's day job is vice president of US division of Swiss bank, UBS, a position which saw him lobby for the banking industry in the run-up to the sub-prime bubble burst as late as this past December. Now, UBS is under investigation for tax havens:

NEWSWEEK has learned that UBS is also currently the focus of congressional and Justice Department investigations into schemes that allegedly enabled wealthy Americans to evade income taxes by stashing their money in overseas havens.

McCain's campaign is already distancing itself from some of Gramm's other work for UBS: his involvement in attempts to sell financial products known as "death bonds," which BusinessWeek described last summer as one of "the most macabre investment scheme[s] ever devised by Wall Street."

Again, perhaps in bad taste, but its Gramm's lack of commitment to national security that should have McCain running for cover.

A six-year struggle to uncover Osama bin Laden's financial network failed because American officials did not skillfully use the legal tools they had, did not realize they needed stronger weapons, and faced resistance at home and abroad, officials involved in the effort say.

Federal officials say they have not persuaded foreign banks to open their books to investigators and that in this country, a law that would have allowed the United States to penalize foreign banks that did not cooperate was blocked last year by a single United States senator.

That single senator was Phil Gramm, then a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Given that al Qaeda could not have launched an operation on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks deprived of finances, tracking down and putting a stop to money laundering by terrorist organizations should have been and should be today a priority in any national security effort. Efforts to put the screws on foreign banks prior to 2001 met with resistance in the Bush White House, but it quickly reversed course after the attacks. Phil Gramm, though single-handedly responsible for blocking the bill, felt no such inkling.

"I was right then and I am right now" in opposing the bill, Mr. Gramm said yesterday..."The way to deal with terrorists is to hunt them down and kill them."

That anyone still believes that is a reliable and practically-feasible method is incredible, but to suggest using force to the exclusion of all other tools is ludicrous.

"We could have starved the organization if we put our minds to it," said Richard Palmer, who gained experience in money laundering as the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Moscow during the 1990's. "The government has had the ability to track these accounts for some time."

Clearly there were many moving parts in the failure of American intelligence which led to the attacks, and any attempt to place that blame on Gramm is erroneous, but the fact remains that Gramm placed the financial interests of the banking industry above that of national security. He was willing to sacrifice the ability to track dirty money before and (somehow) after the WTC attacks, yet has teamed with John McCain as the latter tours the country proclaiming to be strong on national security.

It is the reigning narrative that Democrats are weak on national security and Republicans strong, but the facts simply don't bear that out. There is no tangible evidence of an improvement of American or Israeli security over the past 8 years, though there is ample proof of al Qaeda's reconstitution, Hamas' control of Gaza, and Iran's new-found playground handed to them on a silver platter.

Now, on top of that, McCain employs the economic advice of a man who fought to keep American law enforcement from tracking and freezing money laundering by terrorist organizations. This contradiction may be of little concern, however, as the media is loathe to make any adjustments to its reigning narratives, lest they have to do some mental leg work.

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5 Years On, ATF and FBI Still Letting Turf Wars Impede National Security

Five years after the Homeland Security Act of 2002 united the ATF and FBI under the umbrella of the Justice Department in an effort to avoid the lack of communication and cooperation which led to the failure of the previous September, turf wars are still creating a 'lack of efficiency.'

Writing for the Washington Post, Jerry Markon examines the troubled relationship, saying "the rival law enforcement agencies have fought each other for control, wasting time and money and causing duplication of effort."

Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the investigation of the attacks on the World Trade Center would have been overwhelmed by the significance granted to the complete lack of cooperation between the various agencies within the Executive branch. Succumbing to years of protracted turf wars, the agencies were essentially running completely independent of each other, working more toward supplanting the others than on protecting the country.

The Homeland Security Act was designed to prevent precisely those jurisdiction battles from hampering national security efforts.

The ATF's transfer from the Treasury Department to the FBI's home at Justice after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was supposed to eliminate long-standing tensions between two proud and independent entities,

"We thought we'd get more cooperation from two agencies that ought to be cooperating in the war on terror," Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said of the 2002 law that created the Department of Homeland Security and authorized the merger.

But the transfer, thrown together in the final stages of the largest government reorganization in a half-century, proved to be a merger in name only. The ATF came under the Justice Department seal yet maintained its offices and headquarters. Little thought went into melding the distinctive cultures.

"It was all slapdash," said a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not an authorized spokesman. "One day you wake up, and ATF is part of Justice."

The new law not only failed to repair clashing jurisdictional lines, it also expanded the ATF's role in domestic terrorism cases, bringing that agency into conflict with the core mission of the post-Sept. 11 FBI.

Thus, in addition to merging the competing parties, the HSA essentially created yet newer conflict by adding 'Explosives' to the ATF's name, ensuring even more jurisdictional battles over domestic explosive cases.

Inter-agency conflicts are sometimes inane, such as when "the ATF inadvertently bought counterfeit cigarettes from the FBI." But, too often, investigations into domestic terrorism devolve into a battle for jurisdiction, putting the people the agencies are supposed to protect at risk in the name of pride.

In 2004, Attorney General Ashcroft ordered the bomb data centers and most explosives training be consolidated under the ATF along with all training for bomb-sniffing dogs. The FBI has since refused to transfer the databases and is running its own dog training.

In an act of shear brilliance, Ashcroft essentially "left it up to the task forces to determine terrorist links" in order to decide which agency held jurisdiction. Not surprisingly, in practice this has led to "both agencies descend[ing] on the came crime scenes, often at the same time."

Essentially, Ashcroft tried to solve a conflict by passing the buck to the agencies themselves. By declaring that the FBI handle terrorism-related explosive cases and the ATF all others, he still left it up to anyone to make that distinction. There is no clear arbiter of which agency should handle both cases, and clearly both side with their own in each instance.

It is sad that years after it became clear that jurisdictional and turf battles played a significant role in failing to thwart the attacks of 9/11, Executive branch agencies are still allowing bickering and infighting to interfere with the safety of the American people.

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